Soul Man With a Scottish Burr

Moments after he stepped onstage at the Apollo Theater on Tuesday night, Paolo Nutini was optimally unkempt. His hair had been pre-touseled, his body was tensed, and his face was contorted in concentration as he gripped his microphone and worked from croon to rasp in “Scream (Funk My Life Up).” Soon enough, one side of his shirt would come untucked from his jeans. Mr. Nutini, a Scottish songwriter, is a first-rate student of vintage American soul, and the Apollo stage was a historically apt place to prove it.

“Scream (Funk My Life Up)” is the first song on Mr. Nutini’s current album, “Caustic Love,” which reached No. 1 this year in Britain. Nearly every song on the album was in the Apollo set. It’s not neo-soul that uses hip-hop techniques; it’s straightforward throwback soul, relying on live instruments and an unprocessed voice, and it makes clear references to styles and singers from the 1960s and 1970s: Otis Redding, Al Green, Janis Joplin and some early Rod Stewart, too. When Mr. Nutini does use a sample, it’s a homage, using an excerpt from Bettye LaVette’s “Let Me Down Easy” within a new song by Mr. Nutini with the same title.

As a lyricist, Mr. Nutini piles on the imagery thicker than classic soul songwriters: “A shiver of velvet tension from an astralized dimension/emanating beneath our liberty,” he sang in “Diana,” a suspenseful falsetto ballad recalling Marvin Gaye. But his underlying themes are the same: love, desire, aspiration. He bemoans loneliness or says sweet things: “That girl makes me want to be a better man.”

Onstage, he had a three-man horn section to underline Memphis soul connections. And when he sang, the gentle Scottish burr of his speaking voice made way for American pronunciation. Mr. Nutini understands what classic soul singers learned from church music: the power of dynamics, of the smoothly measured buildup, of a voice growing rawer as it rises but saving something for just a few tormented peaks. He pushed the songs a little harder onstage than in the studio versions, with precise calculation. And every so often, he’d pick up an acoustic guitar and trade the grit in his voice for liquid tenderness, particularly in an encore of Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem.”

Yet Mr. Nutini has the limitations of being a disciple rather than an originator. Nearly every song showed skill, nuance, determination and mastery, but not the abandon that soul’s founding generation could also summon. That changed in “Iron Sky,” a song from the album that leaves romance behind to rail at conformism and brainwashing and call for freedom. The arrangement, again hinting at Gaye, took its time as it rose from musing to full-out imprecation. Mr. Nutini’s voice ascended to nearly a scream, and his face was contorted again, with a passion that came through, finally, as unstudied.